The People’s Police Observatory, a project of www.justice4luis.org to keep SFPD accountable!

In memory of Luis Góngora Pat—a humble Mayan Mexican, a family man, an immigrant laborer and homeless resident of San Francisco, unjustly executed by two SFPD officers—Justice 4 Luis presents:

The People’s Police Observatory

Justice for Luis Góngora Pat launches a new effort in support of citizen oversight of the San Francisco Police Department. We call it The People’s Police Observatory. As part of this effort, we will aggregate and publish publicly available data on police abuses and impunity for further community applications, and disseminate summaries of our findings.

We seek a sea change in police conduct, transparency and accountability. It is high time that San Francisco government institutions acted to make accountable those SFPD officers who harm civilians, violating their most basic human and civil rights.

With your help, we will increase and improve the quality of our observations and oversight. Please write to us at justice4luis @ gmail.com to inform us of additional data you may have collected to include in our table, preferably with a link to a reliable news or data source, or a report that you’d like to publish based on the observatory’s information.

Kick-off projects!

1. A Database of “SFPD Abuses, Scandals and Impunity 2011-2017”

This data set is an Excel table that can be downloaded and searched by anyone. The table includes OIS from 2011-2017; the decisions made by the District Attorney in those OIS; and a list of SFPD scandals during the same period, among other information.

We chose to concentrate on information from 2011-2017 as a means to review the track record for supporting police accountability of both the former mayor Ed Lee and the current District Attorney since the start of their terms in office. This year, 2018, is a mayoral electoral year, and we intend to help set the agenda on policing for the candidates by highlighting the track record on policing of the former mayor and City administration during his time in office.

We invite interested community member to expand our efforts in tracking police misconduct and institutional responses to police misconduct. (For example, we could use help integrating the decision made by the Department of Police Accountability for each of the cases into our table.)

To start making sense of the information collected, we have also summarized some statistical findings into two brief reports:

2. A statistical overview of “Officer-Involved Shootings in San Francisco from 2011-2017: A Legacy of Mayor Ed Lee!”

This report contains basic numeric and demographic data on officer involved shootings (OIS) carried out by SFPD from 2011-2017. The same period that Mayor Ed Lee held office. 51 OIS took place during this period, killing 22 civilians, the large majority people of color. This is Mayor Lee’s legacy.